Images are, of course, the base data that you launch an instance off of. The concept is obviously not new to OpenStack and has been a key feature since the birth of cloud computing. It serves to optimize the virtualization process by de-duplicating the storage and I/O necessary to run an instance.

You can add an image into OpenStack directly via supplying its URL, or uploading directly from your machine. There are also other options, referenced in the manuals below.

The following screenshot below is the screen you see when you upload an images thru Project -> Compute -> Images:

(A note about the above: I wanted initially to upload this to Admin -> System -> Images, but there I did not seem to have permission, even though I was following the procedure as followed in the first URL at the end of this article. Looking at the logs, I saw some error messages saying that glance-api had a bad request for the “x-image-meta-protected” header. I think this is a bug – uploading however thru the admin project works.)

Here, we are uploading a Jessie image directly from the hard drive.

Some more info can be found here:

• http://docs.openstack.org/user-guide-admin/content/dashboard_manage_images.html – Managing images in the panel
• http://docs.openstack.org/cli-reference/content/chapter_cli-glance-property.html – Image service property keys
• http://docs.openstack.org/admin-guide-cloud/content/section_compute-images-and-instances.html – Images and instances from the admin guide